Last week I was in a chat with an HP representative about cloud and openstack when he said “OpenStack is like linux”.
You know, I’m not very fond of Openstack but I couldn’t agree more!
The discussion went on about why OpenStack is like linux and here you are some thoughts:

It’s growing like linux

The Openstack movement is huge, it’s growing like crazy and every week there are new announcements from vendors that dish out their love for it, plan to adopt it or support it in some way.
Actually, it’s not an organic growth and, many times, it looks more a big bandwagon or, in the worse cases, it looks more like a way to stay in touch with a potential enemy than true love.
But it’s growing!

Open like linux

Yes, You know Linux is Open (with the capital O), you can download the latest Kernel and compile it on your PC! But it’s not very useful or, at least not useful in an enterprise environment!
Indeed, Enterprises (with the capital E) are looking for RedHat like distributions: accepted, maintained, supported, stable, secure… in one word: enterprise level distributions!
The problem is that when you come to red hat you lose all the Linux Openness! Yes, do you need an example? try to compile a kernel on your own and then ask for support to your software vendor…
Now come to Openstack: you can download the useless Open version or you can look for an enterprise distribution.

Who will be the RedHat of Openstack?

Here we are! Who will be the Red hat of Openstack? There are few names out of there, and other are coming: Piston Cloud? CloudScaling? (only to name the first few that come my mind)
Really, its impossible to predict who will succeed. They are all small startups and every effort they spend in developments or improvements could be vanished by the natural evolution of Openstack itself.

Bottom line

You can imagine Openstack as Linux at its early stages of life but it won’t mature in 15 years, it will be faster eventually.
On the flip side, Linux was the promise of an “Open” world that we haven’t seen in the real life and it failed in many areas (do I need to remind you linux on the desktop?)